CLA

CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

KEY STAGES

-          Cooing: baby responds to its environment

-          Phonemic expansion: different sounds produced, exploring phonology

-          Phonemic contraction: child retains useful sounds but discards useless ones

-          Holophrases: uses one word to convey a wider meaning, e.g ‘juice’ for ‘I want juice’

-          Two-word stage: introduces syntax, basic meaning is created

-          Telegraphic stage: around 2.5 years old, focus is on lexis, so vocabulary expands

-          Post-telegraphic stage: around 3 years, start speaking in sentences with pronouns and auxiliaries

PHONOLOGY AND MORPHOLOGY

-          Children attempt to simplify their pronunciation, which affects how they say a word:

o    Deletion: final consonants and unstressed syllables are dropped, consonant clusters are reduced to make pronunciation easier

o    Substitution: replace a difficult phoneme with an easier one, e.g w for r, d/n/f for th

o    Reduplication: some parts of word are pronounced correctly but some are changed, e.g ‘gog’ for ‘dog’

-          Overgeneralisation: when a child applies grammar rules incorrectly to a word, e.g ‘eated’

-          This is called a virtuous error, because the child has acquired some knowledge of the commands of language but has not yet learnt how to apply them correctly

-          Overgeneralisation and virtuous errors can be analysed morphologically- how has the child changed the word for it to become a virtuous error?

DEVELOPMENT OF MEANING

-          Productive vocabulary: words a child is able to use correctly and understands the full meaning of

-          Receptive vocabulary: words a child recognises but doesn’t understand the full meaning of

-          Under-extension: child understands the meaning of a word as narrower than it actually is e.g for ‘dog’ they may only associate it with one breed of dog

-          Overextension: child understands meaning of a word as wider than it actually is-

o    Analogical: associating objects that are unrelated, e.g calling a dog a cat because it has 4 legs

o    Categorical: confusing hyponyms with hypernyms

o    Predictive: don’t understand that just because something isn’t in front of them, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist

AITCHSON’S THEORY ON DEVELOPMENT OF MEANING (NETWORK BUILDING)

-          Every child has an innate ability to learn language, and children follow similar patterns in learning

-          Speed of learning is influenced by this innate ability and the child’s environment

-          There are three…